Vassilyev’s head sank on the pillow and he laughed.

“Nothing more absurd and stupid than such a change could possibly be imagined.  Chapter one:  spring, love, honeymoon . . . honey, in fact; chapter two:  looking for a job, the pawnshop, pallor, the chemist’s shop, and . . . to-morrow’s splashing through the mud to the graveyard.”

He laughed again.  I felt acutely uncomfortable and made up my mind to go.

“I tell you what,” I said, “you lie down, and I will go to the chemist’s.”

He made no answer.  I put on my great-coat and went out of his room.  As I crossed the passage I glanced at the coffin and Madame Mimotih reading over it.  I strained my eyes in vain, I could not recognise in the swarthy, yellow face Zina, the lively, pretty ingenue of Luhatchev’s company.

“Sic transit,” I thought.

With that I went out, not forgetting to take the revolver, and made my way to the chemist’s.  But I ought not to have gone away.  When I came back from the chemist’s, Vassilyev lay on the sofa fainting.  The bandages had been roughly torn off, and blood was flowing from the reopened wound.  It was daylight before I succeeded in restoring him to consciousness.  He was raving in delirium, shivering, and looking with unseeing eyes about the room till morning had come, and we heard the booming voice of the priest as he read the service over the dead.

When Vassilyev’s rooms were crowded with old women and mutes, when the coffin had been moved and carried out of the yard, I advised him to remain at home.  But he would not obey me, in spite of the pain and the grey, rainy morning.  He walked bareheaded and in silence behind the coffin all the way to the cemetery, hardly able to move one leg after the other, and from time to time clutching convulsively at his wounded side.  His face expressed complete apathy.  Only once when I roused him from his lethargy by some insignificant question he shifted his eyes over the pavement and the grey fence, and for a moment there was a gleam of gloomy anger in them.

“‘Weelright,’” he read on a signboard.  “Ignorant, illiterate people, devil take them!”

I led him home from the cemetery.

——­

Only one year has passed since that night, and Vassilyev has hardly had time to wear out the boots in which he tramped through the mud behind his wife’s coffin.

At the present time as I finish this story, he is sitting in my drawing-room and, playing on the piano, is showing the ladies how provincial misses sing sentimental songs.  The ladies are laughing, and he is laughing too.  He is enjoying himself.

I call him into my study.  Evidently not pleased at my taking him from agreeable company, he comes to me and stands before me in the attitude of a man who has no time to spare.  I give him this story, and ask him to read it.  Always condescending about my authorship, he stifles a sigh, the sigh of a lazy reader, sits down in an armchair and begins upon it.